The disclosed invention facilitates compacting of materials in existing trash receptacles. A great number of public trash receptacles, trash bins, trash containers, etc. are predominantly filled with light weight, air-filled packaging waste such as paper bags, paper and/or cardboard boxes, drink cups, Styrofoam materials, straws, paper wrap and/or other common waste materials. This waste typically contains significant amounts of air and occupies a large volume of the waste receptacle relative to the weight of the materials. What is needed is a device to reduce the volume of typical waste materials by compressing the waste materials in existing trash receptacles so that each receptacle can hold many times more waste in the original receptacle. This compression greatly reduces the number of trips to empty a receptacle, reduces the total amount of bags and time needed to maintain a trash receptacle with sufficient volume available for additional waste material, reduces the number of trips needed to transport waste materials to a landfill, and reduces the total utilized landfill space.
Disclosed embodiments allow automatic data gathering from a waste receptacle via information technology, so that collected data can be used to increase material handling efficiency. This may be accomplished by prompting an operator to empty the waste receptacle at an appropriate time, ensuring only full or generally full waste receptacles are emptied, or a variety of other actions. This may reduce or even eliminate the amount of time needed to periodically check whether or not a receptacle needs to be emptied. The addition of information technology also adds visibility to the trash receptacles and allows analysis of how much, and in some cases, what kinds of trash are being disposed of at various locations. By gathering and analyzing large amounts of data, patterns and trends may be detected and operations optimized accordingly.
Some disclosed embodiments integrate weight sensors, computer processors, cameras and other sensing devices with the disclosed compactor. The gathered data may be pushed to a cloud or local database for future analysis.
Additional benefits relate to allowing an operator to set the tolerance of compressed weight or volume for each receptacle before signaling that the receptacle needs to be emptied; letting an operator know when trash bags and/or other related materials are running low; letting an operator know when the compactor needs service or maintenance; letting an operator know when full load is approaching and/or how many full loads have been collected, thereby facilitating the pre-scheduling of waste load pick up; customized alerts can be sent to an operator (and multiple other designated personnel) based on predefined criteria; providing multi-layer password protection and optional image capturing devices to capture and analyze images of the material being disposed of for future analysis.